Gutenberg's Apprentice (14 page)

Ahead and to the left the hayfields shimmered in a rime of frost, stitched into blackened rows. The sky was banded in more hues of gray than all their trays of metals. The highway bore away into the mist and split: one tongue licked left down to the river, another straight ahead, the right-hand fork up toward St. Jakob’s. Geese splashed along the inlet. But save for this, there reigned a stillness so complete that it erased all haste from Peter’s soul. The master must have felt the same; he took a great breath in and turned and smiled.

They felt as much as saw the Jakobsberg, looming up above them just outside the city wall. The monastery on that sudden rise reared up so high and close that on a clear day all the monks might hail the deacon of St. Stephan’s in the city on the other side. Peter never had been up to the Benedictines’ keep. Yet he knew like any son of Mainz that to the people of the city it had ever been a threat. The townsfolk rose each generation in revolt against the wealthy abbots and the Elders, burning and destroying in resentment and despair. And just as often did those heavy, jeweled hands swing, biting, back. The bloodshed soaked the marrow of each family, guildsman or patrician, poor or rich.

Gutenberg surveyed the vine-crabbed slope down to the trench cut just beneath the city wall. “They’ll never dig it deep enough. Nor lack for fools on either side.” He straightened, making for the fork and the steep uphill climb. “You know who had it dug?” He glanced at Peter, a sly look in his eyes. “My granddad’s granddad—Wirich was his name. Common workingman of Mainz—you’d think at least the guilds would give me that.” He gave his barking laugh. “My mother’s blood flowed down from his—and cost me entry to the Mint. They drove the ingrate out, of course—although I left of my own free will.”

These grapevines once had been the abbey’s, he went on as they toiled upward. His ancestor had led the city charge that torched them all—St. Jakob, St. Albans, St. Viktor—clawing back those vineyards for the city. An empty victory, of course, for Mainz had been required to pay the restitution. “They pay it still,” he said, and shook his head.

They stopped and stood to catch their breaths before a ramp that led to a great gate. Peter looked across and down, astounded; he’d never seen the city from this high. Everything was tiny: the threadlike rigging of the ships, the toylike wagons, and the people, tiny specks on lanes like veins.

“No wonder that they see us all as pawns.” He didn’t realize, at first, that he had murmured this aloud.

The master stretched out one arm toward the hillock near the river’s edge. “Though on my father’s side, a cousin ran the school at St. Viktor’s.” He raised one eyebrow. “I guess that makes us brothers of a kind.” It surprised Peter, Gutenberg recalling his apprentice’s brief tenure in that order. The master flashed a grin. “I count on that good brotherhood to pray for my black soul when it is time.”

He cinched his belt and squared his cloak. He stood erect, pitched forward on his toes, as if he steered a moving boat. And for the first time Peter saw him, really saw him: the way he straddled those two warring worlds, beholden to no group—no clan, no guild, no class, nor, in God’s truth, to any other man. He stood outside, alone, a solitary soul.

They were expected. The gate swung open with a shudder, and they stepped inside. Peter had expected something grand, but when they entered that wide courtyard he stopped short, amazed.

The monastery was an empty shell, a propped-up and half-built facade. The building right before them was the only one intact; off to the left the abbey church, which should have been its jewel, was only half constructed. It spanned the hilltop like the long stroke of a U, joining to the central building. Its walls were newish, tall, with space for windows, but the nave stood open to the sky. Beneath his breath the master said, “It used to look much worse.” Across the courtyard there were stables, storerooms, a granary that in that season overflowed with hops; a well, a muddy pool, and several wagons. And that was it: no rows of barrel-chested peasants, not a single fatted friar, no sense of busy, serene plenty. The Benedictine abbey of St. Jakob’s, it was clear, had fallen on hard times.

The prior received them in the sacristy—at least the office seemed to serve that function. There were holy vessels, vestments on a shelf. A case of books, as well, in that large room, which looked out on the river from the second floor. Heinrich Brack was older than Peter had imagined: tall and stooped, with hair like iron filings and great pouches underneath his small, dark eyes. He made a jangling as he rose and clamped a hand on his hip to still the ring of keys.

“Dear friend.” He clasped the master’s hand. “I thank the Lord to see you well.”

“My health, sir, lies I think more in your hands.”

Peter caught the faintest ghost of a smile. The master introduced him as his scribe. The prior offered wine.

“One of my greater victories,” Brack said, his hands held deep within his great black habit. “I managed to hold on to most of the harvest this year.”

Brack had come to Mainz from Bursfeld: that was all Peter knew. The reforming wing had sent him to root out monks who siphoned off donations to the common good, restore the common life, the strict ascetic rule. St. Jakob’s abbot, one von Bubenheim, did not appear to have survived the purge. Yet even so it did not look as if Heinrich Brack had made much progress. Peter’s heart had sunk as soon as he set eyes upon the prior’s shelves. He’d pictured more and finer books, codices blind-stamped and stacked in gracious rows, the way they’d been at Saint-Victor. These were dog-eared, though, and scattered in haphazard piles. The prior saw him looking, and he smiled.

“There’s not much here, alas, to tempt a scribe. Though I have done my best to supplement the manuscripts I found.” A novice tiptoed in and poured the wine. “I had to call for many more,” the prior said, “to help me with my work.”

“Ah yes,” the master said. “Your work.”

Brack wiped his cheeks with both his hands, as if to rid them of a weariness. He left them folded just beneath his nose. “It has not gone as I foresaw.” In his eyes, a flash of anger, swiftly mastered. “The cardinal is much beseeched.”

“How soon will he decide?”

Brack sighed. “I wish that I could tell you.” He rose and paced. His habit swung around him as he walked; his voice was thin and hard. “The truth is, many lack the stomach for a real reform.” The master waited, crouched upon the edge of his hard chair. “My text is written, and it was approved. Or so I was led to believe.”

“Our Peter here is anxious to begin,” said Gutenberg. “We hoped you’d part with a few pages—something to convince them, made with our new script.”

Brack looked sharply at the brother who stood sentry, made a sign. Without a word the novice turned and left, pulling tight the door.

“There’s nothing that would please me more. But it would not be . . . politic for excerpts to appear just now.”

“My shop is hardly public.” The master’s voice was tight. “And no one can imagine how it looks until they see with their own eyes.”

Had Rosenberg told Brack exactly how the master planned to make those books? Had he not guessed, at least, that he would not just send the text to monks for copying, as he had always done before? Peter did not know. Gutenberg had given him permission, though, to set a sample—the Our Father—in their new, amazing type. He bent to take it from his pouch, but Prior Brack restrained him with a lifted hand.

“The moment will come. It must. There is no question that we will prevail.” His voice was soft, but had a cutting edge. “There is no room for failure. Reform is all that can save the church now from herself.” He looked at both of them, his dark eyes sober. “The voices of dissent grow ever louder, and with cause. Cusanus is quite mindful.”

On one side, Peter thought, the fattened forces of the status quo, chief among them Archbishop Dietrich—and on the other, the gathering momentum for reform led by Cusanus, Pope Nicholas V’s avenging angel.

“Why, then?” Gutenberg pitched forward. “Why can’t he just approve it?”

Slowly Brack sat down. “You know as well as I do, Meister, our keen interest in your technique.” So he did know, thought Peter. The master straightened, lifted by a sense of pride and purpose. Peter felt a stirring in his heart of hope, faint but unmistakable. This Brack, this Cardinal Cusanus: in the whole world they could not ask for greater champions. There was no match more perfect, suddenly the young scribe saw: the Divine Office of the Mass, rewritten for a cleansed and reborn church, sown wider through this miracle of printing that God in His great wisdom had bestowed on Mainz.

“That is good news,” the master drily said. “Even better would be the order to proceed.”

“What I say cannot go past these walls.” The prior waited for their nods. “There are, as I said, some difficulties. The archbishop has approved my text. But it requires adoption by the Bursfeld conference.” He pursed his lips. “Not all my brethren apparently concur. A faction has proposed a rival text, which hardly merits to be called reformed.”

Gutenberg did not move a muscle. “When,” he said, “will they decide?”

The prior’s eyes were on the farthest wall. “The great battles are eternal,” he murmured, as if speaking to some unseen congregation. “And all foretold. Did not God send His own son to sweep the moneylenders from the Temple?” He sighed then, and returned to them. “You know the church. Everything takes time. Experts must be consulted, opinions issued, reports made. Then there is opportunity for rebuttal.”

“I know the ways of the Holy See.” There was a glitter in the master’s eye. “To my misfortune.”

“I have every faith I will prevail. But I can see too that for you this delay is not desirable.”

There was a long and awkward silence. Gutenberg was folded deep into himself. Brack, too, lapsed back into his own thoughts. There seemed no point, and yet—Peter reached and pulled the proof out of his bag. He smoothed the lines he’d sketched and he and Hans had carved and cast and proofed.

Brack lifted it, and held it to the light. “Fantastic,” he murmured, eyebrows lifted into sharp, dark arches.

“Keep it,” said the master as they rose to go. “For all the good that it will do me.”

“Not desirable! Witless cowl.” They were barely out the gate before his dam gave way. “
Not desirable!
Bloody monks. Mooning away in their crumbling halls.” He went on in this vein, wrapped moodily in his cloak, loosing a string of invective that subsided only slowly as they wound their way back down.

The sun was sinking behind them, above the abbey’s shell. The dying rays bathed their backs and the hillside and the river in a reddish glow. Peter saw his master age right there before him: saw his skin slacken, his keen eyes grow rusty and dull. It might have been no more than a trick of the light, but still it moved him. He begged him not to waste his mind with worry.

“It is not I who waste my mind, but those too blind to see.” Gutenberg’s voice was low and bitter.

“Have faith. We will prevail.”

“Faith! I’ve had this faith my whole life long. You see where it has brought me.” Gutenberg looked back up at the Jakobsberg. “Tight-mouthed scribbler never even breathed a word.”

Peter put a hand out on his shoulder and tried to make things light. “What else did you expect from a monk?”

“Vow of bloody silence.” The master growled it, but at least he laughed.

They came to a turning where orchards rose off to the right and the road to the city turned the other way. Without warning the master scrambled up the bank among the trees. “Rest for the wicked,” he said, and made as if to sit. He stumbled; Peter took his arm and loosed his cloak for him to sit on. Gutenberg batted it away. “Dirt is good enough for me.”

Peter felt he saw a man, then, stripped to his very essence: his gift, his greatness, offered in full knowledge of its value, and rebuffed. Johann Gutenberg stared out across the valley of the Rhine, his face drawn, seeing nothing.

“It’s but a moment’s setback,” Peter said. “Your partner won’t give up so easily.”

“I’ve had many partners, and just as many setbacks.” He gave Peter a queer, almost pitying smile. “I wouldn’t stand here begging, would I, had I ever met with great success?”

“I thought that was your meaning. When you spoke of the Holy See.”

The master’s eyes went back across the river. “They burned me once before with those damn mirrors.” Peter nodded. “We sank a fortune in that pilgrimage to Aachen. Once every seven years.” Gutenberg ran a hand across his face. “But Rome, it seems, can only count to three.” He looked back at Peter. “We made thousands of the things. Then they postponed it—due to plague, they claimed. I got out with a lawsuit and my shirt; I guess the others sold the rest. Only through the grace of God was I not ruined.”

The mass movements of pilgrims, like the great Crusades, ebbed and flowed on some vast tide—as if their destinies were charted by caprice as much as by all-knowing God. And yet, thought Peter, there had been design. Had not that failure served to turn the master to this new, more fruitful work?

“It was then you started on your letters.”

“Though that, too, was a fair disaster at the start.”

Peter had thought so often of that single question—of the one, transforming moment in the master’s life—in the long hours spent carving at his stool. He’d never have a better chance. “What impulse was it,” he asked quietly, “that steered your hand?”

The master’s hand rose absently; he pulled his lips between his finger and his thumb. “I was a young man,” he said finally. “Not so different from you. Thrown out of my own city, forced to find my way.” His eyes closed briefly, and he said: “It came to me while I was walking in the orchard at St. Arbogast’s. I was obsessed, you see, with the idea of making the many from the one.”

His eyes flew open. “Did He not say: ‘Be fruitful and multiply’?” His smile was slightly wistful. “I was walking in the garden, thinking about Eden. I dreamed those years of making things that could be endlessly repeated: over and over the same. I was barred by my mother’s blood from striking coins as a Companion of the Mint—yet still I must have heard those mallets striking in my mind.